The Grasshoppers

I know that John Hinderaker is generally my go-to guy at the Powerline blog, but Paul Mirengoff has a very pity entry on the debt debacle in Greece ... see: Greek Farce Explained. In this posting, Paul quotes a lot of the inside skinny about how the Greek poobahs misplayed their hands at the financing negotiations with the rest of the European Economic Community (EEC). Talk about the JV playing against the L.A. Lakers. This arrogant bunch of lefties from Athens carried with them there the grasshopper's attitude that the world owed them a living. They may have learned a very hard lesson ... which I don't think is over yet.

I myself have a few comments on these Mirengoff revelations:

- How can Finland be made to adsorb such of heavy burden of this Greek indebtedness? This posting reveals that this country is being asked to pay out 10% of its annual budget and 2.5% of its GDP to hold Greece's head above water. This can't be fair. If the rest of the EEC ponied up the same relative amounts, I suspect that this would cover Greece's shortfall many times over.

- How can the EEC or the International Monetary Fund (IMF) lend Greece any more money when they know that they are not going to repay what has already been lent? Yes I know that the formation of the Euro has benefited Northern Europe, mainly Germany, greatly ... GNP growth-wise. But nevertheless, if you have to lend someone money to buy your products ... and you know that this debt will never be repaid ... this seems a silly commercial strategy.

- The U.S. generally has assumed an attitude that all this European economic kerfuffle does not affect us. But we forget that we contribute something like 18% to the IMF funding ... so what the IMF loses, we also partly lose.

Isn't rather ironic that present-day Greeks seem to have forgotten Aesop's lesson from "The Grasshopper and the Ant?"